Mike O’Brien: We’ve been working on Guild Wars for a long time, and have an opportunity to really understand our fans. A lot of this comes from us thinking internally about what people would like to see in Guild Wars. There are a lot things we can do in a campaign or expansion, and a lot of things we can’t do in a campaign or expansion. We’re kind of ambitious people. We want to make Guild Wars the best game it can be. We don’t want to be in a position where there are fantastic things we want to do, but we can’t because they have to interact with design decisions we made many years ago.

So when we start to think about a certain level of high-level changes, such as adding a persistent world or redoing the movement mechanics so that it’s much more ‘joy of movement based’, jumping and running and that sort of thing, we start to see that that is a difficult change to make in a backwards compatible way. Why should we be constrained to do it in a backwards compatible way. Why shouldn’t we make the best Guild Wars game we can make?